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File system fragmentation is more problematic with consumer-grade hard disk drives because of the increasing disparity between sequential access speed and rotational latency (and to a lesser extent seek time) on which file systems are usually placed. [8] Thus, fragmentation is an important problem in file system research and design.
Fragmentation occurs when the file system cannot or will not allocate enough contiguous space to store a complete file as a unit, but instead puts parts of it in gaps between existing files (usually those gaps exist because they formerly held a file that the file system has subsequently deleted or because the file system allocated excess space for the file in the first place).
This arrangement, termed fixed partitions, suffers from inefficient memory use - any process, no matter how small, occupies an entire partition. This waste is called internal fragmentation. [3] [4] Unlike other types of fragmentation, internal fragmentation is difficult to reclaim; usually the best way to remove it is with a design change.
Defragmentation should be disabled on solid-state drives because the location of the file components on an SSD does not significantly impact its performance, but moving the files to make them contiguous using the Windows Defrag routine will cause unnecessary write wear on the limited number of write cycles on the SSD.
According to Scott Hanselman of Microsoft, Windows 7 [verification needed] and later do defragment a solid-state disk (SSD) but in a completely different way. There is less incentive for defragmentation of SSDs because file fragmentation has less performance impact on them and they handle a finite number of storage cycles before their lifespan ...
In computer file systems, a cluster (sometimes also called allocation unit or block) is a unit of disk space allocation for files and directories.To reduce the overhead of managing on-disk data structures, the filesystem does not allocate individual disk sectors by default, but contiguous groups of sectors, called clusters.
An SSD, in form of a 2.5-inch bay device that uses Serial ATA (SATA) interface Internals of an SD card , showing the flash memory and controller integrated circuits A solid-state drive (SSD) provides secondary storage for relatively complex systems including personal computers , embedded systems , portable devices , large servers and network ...
The SSD controller will use free blocks on the SSD for garbage collection and wear leveling. The portion of the user capacity which is free from user data (either already TRIMed or never written in the first place) will look the same as over-provisioning space (until the user saves new data to the SSD).